This is K.M. Wyland, and you are listening to the 46th episode of the Word Play play podcast I can breathe a big sigh of relief now

I finished my rewrite of my fantasy dreamers come and managed to cut a whopping

total of 40,000 words needless to to say, I'm very pleased. The story feels much leaner

and more muscular now, and I'm excited about the beefed-up version of my main character.

Think a mash up of Captain Kirk and Johnny Storm, with maybe a dash of Han Solo, and you've got the new and improved Chris Redston.

My next chore is to clean up the mess I left in my manuscript after all my hacking is slashing.

I need to bolster a few areas in the character and thematic arcs.

Fix up my typos and then I'm free to let the book cool for a while.

How to Tell if your backstory is boring. the book cool for a while.

How to tell if your backstory is boring.

The latest post in the video series on my blog reveals how Alexander Dumas perfectly

balanced the backstory in his beloved classic the Three Musketeers.

To give the readers just the amount of information they needed at just the right moment to keep them gobbling up the story. You can watch the video on my blog at Wordplay-K-M-Yland, that's W-E-I-L-A-N-D. blog spot.

New videos are posted every Wednesday.

Meanwhile, enjoy this week's podcast. Why Character Stereotypes are a good thing.

Stereotypes are bad, right?

They're cliched stock characters that rob your story of originality and immediacy.

Readers realize they've read about these characters and dozens of other stories, lose interest and cast the book aside.

True enough so far, but what we often fail to realize is that stereotypes can be successfully

applied in two ways. We can use them and we can play off them.

Because stereotypes are widely recognized, they provide us common ground with the reader.

From that starting place, we ground with the reader.

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